Mundane Joys
by SnubNosedSilhouette
Summary: The truly remarkable thing was that neither of them had much trouble at all adjusting.


For honeynoir's prompt at Ladymercury_10's Amy/Rory Cheerup Ficathon on LiveJournal: "Amy and Rory, enjoying the slower path."

* * *

The truly remarkable thing was that neither of them had much trouble at all adjusting.

At first, Amy rationalized that they'd spent so much time traveling with the Doctor that they'd both grown accustomed to acclimating themselves to whichever time period or culture they found themselves in.

Then Rory pointed out just how infrequently they'd been without reliable indoor plumbing, and Amy was forced to reconsider. Maybe they were just ready for a slower life.

There had been a bank account, the details of which had been delivered to them three days after their arrival by a messenger who claimed to have gotten the package from a woman with wildly curling hair. That was when they started to understand the rules. River and the Doctor couldn't interact with them directly - never mind the whys - but they could help in whatever way they were able. And they did.

Rory enrolled in medical school as male nurses weren't as acceptable in the late nineteenth century as they'd been in the twenty-first. A full set of transcripts and letters of recommendation had arrived in much the same way as the banking information.

Amy wrote, which was what Amy had always done. To the Doctor at first, because why not, but as the weeks and months passed she started writing for herself, then for other people.

One year to the day after they'd arrived, Amy wrapped her first manuscript in twine, checked the address twice, and hand delivered it to three literary agents in Manhattan.

They'd found a house with a blue door in Brooklyn two days after she sold the book.

It wasn't their old house, but when Rory impulsively swept Amy into his arms to carry her across the threshold for the first time (something he'd always wished he'd done before) they both knew they were home.

* * *

Life was very different, Amy realized, when one couldn't simply skip the dull bits.

Not just day-to-day Tuesdays and Thursdays (the Doctor never told them that he always went straight for Saturdays, but they'd figured it out for themselves quickly enough) but going to the baker every day for fresh bread, washing every utensil by hand because there wasn't an alternative, and finally sending their laundry out because the lye soap made Amy's hands crack and bleed. She was shocked to discover just how much of her day could be spent doing nothing but going to the markets and preparing three meals from scratch. Rory finally pointed out that they could afford to hire a cook. Amy agreed when she realized that she'd have more time to write if she wasn't always in the kitchen.

There was also the matter of no telly and no radio. At night, after a long day at the hospital for Rory and an equally long day divided between household chores and writing for Amy, they couldn't just retreat to armchairs and mindlessly unwind. Rory had never read so many books, nor, he realized, had he ever spent so much time just talking to Amy about anything and everything. In the beginning they had amused themselves by re-telling every Doctor story they could think of. Soon they ran out, though, and their conversations began to focus increasingly on the fascinatingly mundane details of their real life. This real life.

Amy took up sewing, mostly to have something to occupy her hands during those conversations. She found she enjoyed it, though, and could not have been more pleased the day she finished her first shirtwaist. Crooked seams and all, Rory declared he'd never seen anything more stylish.

It wasn't as if they'd had communication problems before (aside from the months when they had) but now there were no distractions. They had each other, and for the first time they both realized just how lucky they were to have chosen such an endlessly interesting partner in life.

* * *

There were no other children.

At first, Rory had hoped that somehow, some way, the things that had been done to Amy might have been reversed by the Angels. He knew it was a ridiculous hope, but there it was.

Amy's first book was for children. It was a tale about a man who could travel in space and time, and who took a little girl along for all his adventures.

After that, they never wanted for young people in their lives.

* * *

When the manuscript from River had finally arrived, more than a decade after they'd last seen their daughter, Rory cried. Amy didn't. She cut through the twine eagerly with her sharpest pair of scissors, and hungrily devoured the contents of the letters enclosed with the novel. She smiled at her daughter's handwriting, and laughed when she re-read the purple prose that would eventually (or had already) make the Doctor say "Yowza!"

She wondered if he still said it.

She wondered if he'd taken to wearing her glasses.

She didn't wonder why the ache in the Doctor-place in her heart no longer hurt quite so much.

* * *

The first time she signed her name "Mrs. Amy Williams" Rory felt a lump rise in his throat.

"Not Pond-Williams?" he asked.

"No," she said. He expected that she'd have been moody the rest of the day – wrapped up in her thoughts about might-have-beens, but she wasn't. She was still, forever, irrepressibly Amy. The name, it turned out, didn't really matter at all.

* * *

They grew older. Amy bought new spectacles, and before long Rory needed them too. They had friends and neighbors: people they loved. They even went back to England twice via steamship, only joking once that the trip between Britain and America used to seem much shorter.

They stayed in the house with the blue door. No more messengers arrived with packages from wild-haired women. It didn't matter – they'd stopped looking for them long ago.

That was the thing about the slow life – it wasn't slow at all. It was full, it was busy, and most of all it was very, very happy.


End file.
